The Nanny State Has Blown the Bank

The Nanny State Has Blown the Bank

By David Warren – September 10, 2010 - Ottawa Citizen

EXTRACT – The Nanny State has blown the bank. She, or it, has done so everywhere. Even after appropriating half of every national income with taxes both direct and indirect, and after offloading the costs of cumbersome do-good schemes onto businesses through convoluted regulations, Nanny is reduced to printing money.

From the liquidators’ point of view, however, the problem is rather more complicated: the debtors are more hostile than the creditors. Thanks to democracy, and the power of “the people,” under the inspiration of demagogues, to appropriate each other’s wealth, there seems no chance of a smooth disposition.

Our debts have been rephrased as “entitlements.” They are the fiscal dimension of “human rights.” Everyone has a “right” to a pension, and to much else besides, regardless of whether he put his share into the piggy; or whether Nanny absconded with what he did put in….

The closest thing I can see to hope is currently invested in the tea party movement of the U.S.

Notwithstanding the slanders heaped upon it, this movement is good-willed, riot-free, indeed situationally non-urban, and under the leadership of basically sane people. Of course, there is no guarantee that any movement devoted to genuine political change can remain so, under the inevitable provocations.

But something must be done, and here is the closest thing, anywhere in the West, to a political movement committed to the only measure that can possibly save us from riding over that cliff. Merely slowing down won’t do it.

That measure is, quite frankly, the complete dismantlement of the Nanny State, and the restoration of the status quo ante — governments focused on the provision of national defence, and domestically on the machinery of law and order. Full stop.

While that happens to be the only available formula for mitigating our impending economic and social catastrophe — leave people free not only to earn, but to help each other flexibly and directly — the issue of freedom itself lies deeper.

For the Nanny State isn’t, and never was, compatible with the organic development of a free society.

We do need laws to be enforced against specific, definable evils. But insofar as we are adults, we have never required comprehensive daycare.